482 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [vor. 48 
southern Europe. It is hardly necessary to remark that we have 
no fossil evidence of its former occurrence there, yet it can scarcely 
be doubted that at one time its line of dispersal from the east lay 
in that direction and that, like the lemming and many other species 
of the same invasion, it became extinct in the Alpine regions of 
the south. The evidence of such a connection with Asia is fur- 
nished by the slightly different form, Cannabina brevirostris, which 
is so closely allied to it that Hartert has connected the two forms 
trinominally in spite of the hiatus of 2,000 statute miles (3,220 km.) 
between their breeding areas. This Asiatic form of the twite ex- 
tends from Caucasus through Persia, Turkestan and Tibet into 
Manchuria, and it is inconceivable that the two forms have not been 
separated in comparatively recent times.’ 
The second species is the rock pipit, Anthus petrosus,? which 
doubtless is only a subspecies of a circumpolar species and for that 
reason will be known by many ornithologists as Anthus spinoletta 
petrosus. The group of forms embraced by them in the term 
A. spinoletta is represented in subarctic North America (I speak 
only of the breeding ranges) by A. pensilvanicus, in eastern Asia 
by A. japonicus, in central Asia, west to the Caucasus by A. 
blakistoni, while a special form A. couwtellii is peculiar to the 
mountain regions of Persia. “A. spinoletia spinoletia” to 
them is the name of the bird which “ during the breeding season 
inhabits the mountains of central and south Europe, the Vosges, 
the entire region of the Alps up to an altitude of 2,500 m., the 
Schwarzwald, the Hartz Mountains, the Sudeten, the Thuringian 
Forest, the Pyrenees, the high mountain systems of Spain, the 
Karpathians, and the mountains of the Balcan Peninsula and 
Asia Minor, as well as the high mountains of Italy and surely 
also Sardinia” (Hartert, Vog. Palaarkt. Fauna, 11, 1905, p. 
280). In all these localities the water pipit, or Alpine pipit, as 
Seebohm has proposed to call this type, is confined to the moun- 
* Another closely allied form from Kashmere has been described recently 
by Hartert. It will stand as Cannabina flavirostris stoliczke, or C. 
brevirostris stoliczk@ according to the view as to the degree of distinctness 
of C. brevirostris. 
* This is the bird usually known to European ornithologists as Anthus 
obscurus. The name Alauda obscura given to it by Latham, in 1790, is ante- 
dated by the two years older Alauda obscura of Gmelin (Syst. Nat., 1, ii, 1788, 
p. 801) which is an entirely different bird. Montagu’s Alauda petrosa (Trans. 
Linn. Soc. London, tv, 1798, p. 41), based on the same specimen which served 
Latham as type of his A. obscura, must, therefore, be adopted as the oldest 
available name. 
